Angry Birds Evolution Tips, Cheats and Strategies

You’ve seen the Angry Birds in just about every form imaginable, including plenty of forms outside mobile games. But are you ready for an Angry Birds Evolution?

The title of Rovio’s latest addition to its super popular and long-running franchise is an apt one, because the birds have changed. No longer the cute, two-dimensional characters you once flung at buildings, these are birds you probably don’t want to run into in a dark alley. Seriously, Alfred Hitchcock would have a field day with members of this flock.

Angry Birds Evolution explores a new genre as well, bringing the battle between birds and pigs into the turn-based RPG realm. It’s a perfect fit for mobile, as titles too numerous to list have discovered, and the best part is that the game’s developers managed to keep part of the gameplay comfortably within the realm of Angry Birds games past.

If you’ve been curious about it or just started playing, our Angry Birds Evolution Tips, Cheats and Strategies can help your mastery of the game take flight. And that’s probably the last bird-related pun we’ll make here. Maybe.

The Basics of Pig-Bashing

Perhaps the nicest thing about Angry Birds Evolution is that you don’t have to go against the instincts you’ve honed since 2009. You do, in fact, hurl your birds at the pigs to damage them. For basic attacks, you simply pull back on the bird you want to use, slide from side to side to set the desired angle — which the game helpfully highlights for you to show where you can expect the bird to go early on — and then let go to let them rip.

As you might expect, there’s a little more to it than that. The sides of the playing field can be used for bank shots, and your birds do more damage when they hit pigs from the rear. You’ll also see power-ups drop on the board from time to time, and since you can pick them up just by sliding through them, which could affect your decision on where to aim.

However, by far the most important factor in choosing your target is that the pigs will strike back at you, in a number of turns indicated by the numbers over their heads. If you want to avoid defeat, it behooves you to take out the pigs that are attacking soonest before you worry about their friends.

Bonus tip: You can tell if you’ll eliminate a pig from the board before you execute your shot because a “KO” will display. it’s likely you’ll actually do a lot more damage than it first appears as your bird bounces around, but it’s still nice to know if your initial target will be taken out or not.

Bonus tip 2: Almost everything in Angry Birds Evolution is destructable, so don’t be put off if it looks like the pigs are safely holed up at the beginning of a level. You can change that pretty quickly. And TNT works like it always has …

Skill Shots, or Why the Color of Your Birds Matters

The color of your birds matters for more than just their lovely plumage. You may have noticed there are countdown timers above your birds’ heads just as there are for the pigs. Those are counting down to the next time your bird can perform a Skill Shot, which can tilt a battle in your favor quickly.

Here’s the corresponding Skill Shot for each color of bird:

Black birds detonate over an area indicated by a black circle on the screen, doing damage to anything in that circle.

Blue birds split into multiple birds the first time they hit something, with each bird then bouncing around the board independently.

Red birds defy the law of momentum as we understand it, giving an extra shove to the first pig it hits and knocking it into other pigs.

White birds do a special straight-line attack and damage anything in that line.

Yellow birds pierce through enemy pigs and keep going to damage anything else they pierce until they stop.

You’ll also encounter levels where specific colored birds get bonuses, so it helps to keep a ready supply of all colors in your collection as you advance through the game.

How to Get More and Better Birds

If you’ve played any turn-based RPG before, you’ll get the sense that the birds you acquire near the beginning of Angry Birds Evolution aren’t going to cut it long term — and you should trust your instincts, because they’re correct in this case. How can you add more birds to your flock?

You can start at the Hatchery, which you can visit by tapping the egg icon on the bottom of the map screen or tap on directly from town. The Hatchery contains both regular eggs, which contain 1- to 4-star birds and you can hatch for free every four hours, and premium eggs, which yield 2- to 5-star birds and can be hatched by watching a video every 48 hours, or by spending gems. Note that if you go the latter route, it pays to save up enough gems to hatch 10 premium eggs in one shot, as one of the birds you receive is guaranteed to be a 4-star bird.

How much do those star rating matter? Quite a bit, as the game informs you that a 2-star bird just starting out is better than a 1-star bird at level 9.

You’ll also receive birds pretty regularly just by playing and successfully completing levels, so your roster is going to improve as you go even if you ignore the Hatchery altogether. Once you hit player level 30, you’ll also find Super eggs as rewards for some battles and dungeons. As the name implies, these eggs can produce some of the birds in the game, though you’ll have to play for a while before you uncover them.

Making Birds Better: Leveling Up and Evolving

Leveling up birds is accomplished via the time-honored method of using weaker birds to strengthen the ones you really want to use. Angry Birds Evolution calls this process fusing, and you can do it by tapping on ‘Your Team’ in town and then tapping on the ‘Level Up’ tab. The important things to remember with fusing is that you’ll lose the bird you use as fodder, it costs gold to fuse — the more powerful the target bird, the more gold it will take — and that you get an XP boost for fusing birds of the same color.

It wouldn’t be much fun for a game with “Evolution” in its title if you couldn’t do something to evolve your birds once they reach max level, and happily, you can. Simply tap on the ‘Evolution’ tab to see what resources you need to evolve the bird to a more powerful form, most of which you’ll find as battle or dungeon rewards. You can also get more evolution materials by selling unwanted birds instead of using them as leveling fuel. You’ll be well-served to remember that 1- to 3-star birds can be evolved three times, while the rarest birds can be evolved five times total.

Scouts Ahoy

During the tutorial portion of Angry Birds Evolution, you’ll be introduced to your corps of scouts. These are specialized birds who, perhaps obviously, scout out locations on the game map to find stuff for you to either collect (like gold and reward chests) or battle (pigs, natch).

To send out a scout, simply look for the symbol on the map that looks like a slingshot turned into a military insignia and tap on it. Your scout’s findings will be apparent immediately; you collect gold or chests just by tapping on them and can choose to enter one of the battles it locates by doing the same to a pig.

Battles located by scouts are completely optional, and there’s no penalty to your progress through the game for deciding not to fight in them. Still, they are good sources of gold, eggs and other goodies that might be a boost to your overall team strength for when you inevitably hit a wall in terms of the difficulty of the story mode, so playing them when you can spare the time is a good idea.

While you only have three scouts at your disposal, they recharge at the not horrible rate of one per hour, and you can watch a video to restore a single scout or pay 150 gems to get them all recharged at once.

Flap Inside the Arena

The Arena is where PvP matches take place, which again is pretty much common sense for a game of this type. PvP battles utilize the same rules of combat as a solo battle, except since you can’t do damage directly to your opponent’s birds, your objective is to knock as many pigs as possible on the playing field onto your opponent’s side. After each player’s turn, the pigs on each side will do damage to that player, so if, say, there are six pigs on your opponent’s side and only two on your own, your foe is going to suffer a lot more damage than you.

The stats of your birds still matter, particularly health, and your match-ups are determined strictly by the number of trophies, which increase with each win and decrease with each loss. Thus, if you level up your squad a lot between trips to the Arena, you’re likely, though not guaranteed, to be up against weaker opponents. This might not matter until you get the hang of the shots to make to force pigs onto the other side, but it definitely can’t hurt.

While it would be nice to be able to play as many Arena battles as you want, there is a limit on PvP play. You’ll first use the free battles available to you, which recharge over time or by watching videos, and then dip into your supply of Arena Tickets. Seasons in the Arena last for exactly one week, and you earn rewards at the end of each one based on your rank within the PvP leaderboard structure.